Touchstone (29 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

T
HEY ENCOUNTERED
no other impertinent musicians on their way to the barn. Back in his room, Stuyvesant checked his freshly scrubbed finger-nails and studied his pink and glowing, moustache-free face in the mirror, then scowled at the dull neck-tie. He traded it for another, took that one off and tried a third. He combed his hair, took another run at his finger-nails with the nail-brush, and gave it up.

Before he left the room, he checked the alignment of the shoes in the wardrobe, but they had not been disturbed.

Downstairs, Sarah’s door was standing open, and she popped out when she heard his feet on the stairs.

“I say, how would you feel about ducking out on the family luncheon? There’s this adorable scruffy little inn down in the next village that was a part of my childhood, a place a visiting American really ought to experience.”

“I wouldn’t want you to miss your friend Bunsen,” he said.

“No fear of that, he’s in Manchester until at least four.”

“Then sure, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than play hooky with you.”

“That’s good, ’cause I’ve already told Gallagher we wouldn’t be there.” She tucked her arm snugly into his for the four steps it took to reach the door, although to his disappointment, she did not resume the position once they were outside. For some time, his biceps tingled with the warmth of her breast.

They walked down the road again, past the garage and the stables, pausing at the ford to talk to the ducks. They did not cross on the foot-bridge, however, but kept following the stream as its valley narrowed and rose. Eventually, they climbed onto the surrounding level of countryside, where trees gave way to open fields and, in the distance, a cluster of low buildings. Back in the direction of Hurleigh House, across a field, over a stile, through another field dotted with sheep droppings, and then a gate. All the while, Sarah talked.

She was a champion talker, was Sarah Grey, her stories about growing up and about the poor women and children she worked with filled with passion and the telling detail. She told him about the health classes she and Laura were teaching, about her single attempt at university, about her childhood, about her brother.

“Anyway,” she said, with an air of continuing a conversation, “I’m glad he’s got at least one friend. Other than the Cornish farmers he lives among, none of whom seem to count.”

“Because they’re beneath his class?” he said in all innocence.

She half turned and punched his arm. “Don’t you tease me, you American brute. I’ll have my brother challenge you to a duel. He’s a deadly fencer, you know.”

“But what would that say about your rights as a woman, needing to be protected by a male?”

“It would say that I have as much scorn for the system as I have for your attempts at teasing,” she retorted.

“Touché,” he said.

“Are you a fencer as well, then?”

“Sure—I spent a whole summer once, pounding posts and stringing wire.”

“Pounding…? Oh,” she said, “terrible joke.”

“I didn’t think it was a joke at the time. However, if you’re talking about swords and foils and such, then no, I’m more a six-shooter kind of a guy. But I like your brother a lot. I’m glad we don’t have to meet at dawn.”

“You really just happened to stroll into his yard, on your way to Land’s End?”

Stuyvesant set off into a somewhat more detailed version of the story Grey had told her the previous afternoon, concocted to explain his presence on Grey’s land two summers earlier. He was surprised at how distasteful the lie was, and the effort it took to stick to it.

“So,” he finished up, “when Ford sent me over here this time, I took a few days’ holiday to see your brother. Problem is, this whole trip has made me realize how fed up I am with the company. I’ve been with it on and off nearly ten years, and it’s no fun any more. Too big.”

“By which you mean, the workers and the management have little contact with each other.”

“I suppose you’re right. I’m a cog—a selling cog, connected to a service cog and an advertising cog and eventually to a whole lot of manufacturing cogs. I’ve got some savings. I was…Well, I was sort of thinking of going into business for myself.”

“Doing what?”

“Running a garage, maybe. I like getting my hands on cars. Makes it feel real.” Christ, he thought, I’m beginning to believe my own cover story.

“Where?”

“Oh, New York I guess. Maybe upstate, where it’s quieter. The only place I’ve seen that I like as well is Cornwall, but there don’t seem to be more than two dozen cars in the whole county.”

“There’s lots of motors in London,” she offered. Then, as a blush rose through her freckles, she hurried to amend what might be taken as forward. “Although considering how popular rambling has become, before you know it, Bennett will be driving people like you off his land with a shotgun. Motor-tourists won’t be far behind.”

“Unless the revolution comes,” Stuyvesant noted solemnly.

To his pleasure, she took the opportunity to punch him again, this time harder.

Another place, another girl, he’d have taken it as an invitation to grab her and kiss her, but not here, not now.

Instead, he squatted down and dug a couple of half-opened dandelions out of the weeds and handed them to her. She tucked them into a button-hole in her sweater. Apology given and accepted.

And she tucked her arm through his for the rest of the way to the village, her breast very occasionally making contact with the back of his arm.

The village scarcely qualified as such, being six buildings and an old well. The inn was called the Dog and Pony, and Sarah came to a halt to look up at the sign. “You see it?”

“See what?” Stuyvesant asked. After a minute, he did.

The dog on the sign was one of the Duke’s deerhounds, tongue lolling as if in laughter. The pony was a true pony, stumpy and glowering, but the straight-spined figure on its back could only be the Duchess of Hurleigh.

Sarah grinned at his surprise, and pulled him around a propped bicycle and through the door.

The inn might have been built by the prehistoric inhabitants of the British Isles, the people whose child-sized adult armor graced museums. Stuyvesant stooped double to enter, and even Sarah had to duck to keep her hat in place.

The interior was dark and smelled of centuries of wood and tobacco-smoke, the stones of the floor were polished by generations of sluiced beer, and the inhabitants might have been in a diorama labeled:
Early Britain.

“You’ll have to buy the beer,” she told him. “It might give them all heart attacks if I tried to. And we’ll have to go into the saloon bar to drink it.”

“Feminism hasn’t made much inroads here, I see?”

“They’ve probably never laid eyes on an actual Flapper, and if I lit a cigarette they’d take me for a witch and duck me in the pond. I’ll be next door.”

He asked the rotund gnome behind the bar for a pint, a half pint, and two lunches (which the man insisted were dinners). Keeping a close eye on the beams, he maneuvered through the wood and stone cavern to the doorway, where he found a far lighter, newer, tidier room with roof beams that he could nearly straighten up under. There were six tables ranging from twosomes to one that would hold a Stuyvesant family gathering, all of them empty except for where Sarah sat. She had chosen one beneath a bow window of glass panes the size of his palm, most of them too wavery to see through to the street beyond.

“Don’t you just adore the place?” she insisted.

“They’d never make it in New York,” he told her. “Half the patrons would be knocked unconscious before they reached the bar.”

“I only wanted you to see the room, which Daniel swears hasn’t changed since it was built in the thirteenth century.”

“But how was this a part of your childhood? I wouldn’t have thought little girls were allowed in pubs.”

“That’s exactly why. This was The Forbidden Place, dark and mysterious, with a sorcerer to guard it and only the initiated permitted inside.”

“I’d have thought the reality so disappointing, you’d never want to set foot here again.”

“True, but by that time it was part of the tapestry of growing up. Laura used to write plays for us to perform, and half of them were about nefarious plots and acts of dark derring-do that went on here.”

“Laura’s quite a girl.”

“When she was young, she was a tom-boy. Can you believe that?”

“Yes, I could see it.”

“She used to lead Bennett and the two older boys on all sorts of outings. Maybe it’s what comes from being first born, even if you’re a girl. And then when she hit maturity and really couldn’t run around like a wild Indian, she turned to romantic dreaming.”

“A romantic, huh?”

“She doesn’t look like that, either, does she? All competence and realism. But underneath all that, Laura’s terribly squishy for the Grand Romantic Gesture—the first time I met her, when I was eleven and she was about to turn sixteen, she’d memorized the whole of
Romeo and Juliet,
and she used to go around with this little glass vial and pull it out to declaim the death scenes, both his and hers. I was terribly impressed.”

“Bennett’s very fond of her.”

“Yes.” A flat answer, from her.

“You don’t sound too pleased about it.”

“It’s not that. It’s just…he and Laura were secretly engaged, the first year of the War. She was of age, but he was only twenty. Then when he finished at Oxford he enlisted, so they put it off again. When he was wounded, I’m sure she would have married him anyway—tragedy being an essential part of Romance, don’t you know? She more or less lived in the village near his sanitarium, although at the time I couldn’t understand why she didn’t stay here at Hurleigh, it’s not that far away. But in the end—and I don’t know this for certain, because neither of them will talk about it—but I think that when Bennett realized he was never going to fully recover, he practiced a Grand Romantic Gesture of his own. He disappeared. To Cornwall, although we didn’t know that for some time.”

“Hard on both of them, I imagine,” he remarked, since she seemed to be awaiting a comment.

“Certainly it was hard on her. That was in 1921—the world was on the brink of revolution then, too, or so it seemed—you know we had a strike in the spring of 1921? It might have succeeded if some of the Union leaders hadn’t given in. Anyway, Laura was so down in the dumps, both with Bennett’s leaving and some hard problems with her work, that the family was frankly worried for her health. I talked her into coming to London with me for a change of scenery, something to get interested in, you know? And along the line I introduced her to Richard, who was one of the miners’ shining lights in the Strike, and he seemed to just, I don’t know, pulse with energy. And of course he’s very good-looking anyway, and she took one look at him and, well, Juliet had her new Romeo.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t all that happy about it—I thought it was too soon, and in any event he wasn’t my brother—but in the end I had to admit she was right. Richard was…intoxicating, where Bennett was so dark and hard to be around after the War, and looking back, I can’t say that Laura sticking it would have made a difference to him. However, that’s why I said I was glad to see he had a friend like you—he seems almost his old self this week-end.”

Was he imagining the note of uncertainty in her voice, at the idea of Bennett being his old self? Perhaps she should be concerned, considering Laura Hurleigh’s conflicting ties with the founder of Look Forward.

“Tell me more about this Bunsen fellow,” he suggested.

But as she burbled on about the founder of Look Forward, as they ate their surprisingly tasty meat-and-two-veg, and as he made his responses at all the proper places, he found himself wondering if perhaps he shouldn’t just tell the Bureau to kiss his ass after all, and go into the car repair business in Penzance.

Or London, where there were, as she’d said, a lot of cars.

“Tell me about this Bunsen chap,” Grey said. He and Laura Hurleigh were only two miles from the Dog and Pony, riding in amicable silence while the Duke’s two deerhounds coursed back and forth between the horses and the surrounding countryside. The air was warm and the clean animal smell coming off the horses mingled with the odors of spring and the smell of the leather saddle. The jingle of tack, the shape of the hills, and Laura’s knee near his brought back all the rides of his youth; for a moment, Bennett Grey had felt almost happy.

It was such an unnerving sensation, he instantly pushed it away, and Stuyvesant’s quarry was the first thing that came to mind.

At the question, Laura’s gelding snorted and jerked its head; Grey’s skull throbbed in reaction to the sudden wave of tension from her body. Then she loosed her grip on the reins and answered in a voice in which all emotion was clamped down. “He’s a great man, Bennett. I’m so glad you’re going to meet him. He said he’d be here for drinks. Maybe even in time for tea.”

He ordered his hands to stay on the reins and not betray the rising headache. She might as well have said,
“I fell in love with him, Bennett, but I’m afraid I’m falling out, and I’m too committed to leave.”
He also heard notes of experience and exasperation in her voice, which told him that Bunsen would show up whenever he damn well pleased, be it noon or midnight. Or never.

“They say he’s to be Labour’s next leading light.”

“They do, don’t they?” she said.

“You don’t sound at all sure about it.”

“Oh, I have no doubt Labour adores him. What I can’t decide is if he’s right in thinking that siding with Labour is a justifiable compromise. It would give him authority and visibility; on the other hand, the more one knows about parliamentary democracy, the more corruption and deceit one sees. As I said to your American friend, the system is designed to keep workers enslaved. There’s a real danger that by siding with it, even temporarily, his voice will be lost.”

There were lies in her tone, her spine, the tilt of her head, lies that crept over him like the wet mud of France.
Please don’t lie to me, Laura my love,
he pleaded.
You might as well drive a knife into my brain.